Tim McElwee - web portfolio and thoughts from Long Island and New York City

Hello!

I'm a developer/designer living just West of the Rockies near Salt Lake City. I've been coding with an eye to
standards-based clean HTML, CSS, and Javascript for over fifteen years. Lately, I've picked up skills in
page performance, mobile web development, data visualization, and user experience prototyping. I like to design clean, uncluttered layouts that lead users into the content. See
some of my work or learn more about me.

While I was working at SelectMinds, the company
decided to update it's branding to better reflect
it's place as a leader in the world of corporate
social networking. I worked in conjunction with
the Director of Product Management and the marketing
team to create a clean and modern website design
that matched the new branding initiative. (The link above goes to an Archive.org version
of the site that is missing some of the sIFR headlines and flash elements.)

Freelance Interactive

This was a quick chop and layout for a friend (and former co-worker). It was a great opportunity, with 50%+ of their user base on Chrome, to try out Modernizr to progressively enhance the experience with CSS3 gradients and other features.

The Parent Resource Center website hadn't been visually updated in years. In 2009, I decided that they'd done enough for my kids that I ought to volunteer. I tried to keep it a little whimsical, but not too crazy with the website's primary audience being parents.

This is a great little site for my former employer's consulting company. Using the nautical theme and colors of their logo, I created a more modern visual framework for their important information. Now they have one of the best looking websites in their space.

FreeWorldU is an online education site that with a goal to provide "free
online education to everyone worldwide," using a flashcard model. I've
worked with the development team to refine several areas of the site, from
the flashcards to the administrative sections.

Working with a former colleague who'd gone back to graduate
school, I created the Working Papers site with
a clean, modern design to reflect the editors'
initiative to revitalize the publication as an online
journal. The design incorporates color elements
from the larger University of Pennsylvania branding.

This is the internet presence for my
father's tour company. He specializes in small-custom
tours and wanted a site that reflected the more
professional and experienced nature of his business.
The primary goals of the redesign were to better
showcase tour features and the beauty of Ireland.
Luckily my dad's a pretty good photographer.
I focused on incorporating large, colorful images
to show potential tour guests exactly what they can
see and do.

I created a style sheet based upon a Vanderbilt
Creative Services design for the Vanderbilt University
redesign that was live from August 2005 until August 2007.
As part of their regular refresh cycle, the university webmasters
wanted the site to use the latest development techniques. I'd just
finished helping Peabody College create their first CSS-driven site,
so they asked me along with other campus web professionals to assist.

I created the School Choice Center site to provide
an initial presence for this federally funded education
research center, with the intention that it would
serve as a hub for information dissemination to
partner institutions and the general public.

I wanted to incorporate a sense of the long history of
educational debate surrounding school choice.
With the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education near the founding of this center,
I created a design that had the feel of a piece of school
letterhead and newspaper articles of the 1950s.

One of the primary goals of this project was to provide maximum HTML control for the webmaster and
Peabody web team while allowing design variation for departments and centers. The result was one stylesheet that controlled all of the college's changing visual identities.

This is a partially completed design for an online hockey league using
NHL 2005 from EA Sports. Though the project was ended by the client before completion, it features
a nice DHTML menu while fitting into the exitsting site structure.

The PJE website
serves as journal's Vanderbilt web presence, providing
abstracts for each article and a means of accessing
features from the publisher's website for those
who begin their search at Vanderbilt's website.

A redesign and expansion, the Peabody Center website
was created to provide information about researchers,
research projects, news updates, and sponsored
seminars. The design incorporated leaf motiffs similar
to Peabody College marketing materials that focused on the
campus' status as an arboretum.

CATIE's site serves as an informational repository for potential patients,
their families, and researchers. Navigation and overall feel was improved
by separating the two major areas of the study with the colors of
the logo and tying them together on the homepage where the connection
made the most sense.

The Schizophrenia Research Center's site served as
the public face of the research center and it's
investigators. It was challenging to reach a consensus
about the design and symbolism, but the final outcome
is simple and unique with the progression of disease
and research growing outward like a sea shell.

GVSU ARSP Division

Design, HTML, CSS, JS

Here I have created a site for a division which provides
a great deal of information and service to the
campus. I've tried to maintain some of the top-level
layout and design elements within the program sites
in order to create a more unified experience. One
of the program sites is included below.

Testing Services

Design, HTML, CSS

Testing Services coordinated a number of GVSU tests, including math and
writing placement, CLEP, and English as a second language.

For the PDFs on the Working Papers site, I wanted to create a consistent structure and typography
that would provide a more professional appearance. After all, it's created by Ph.D. candidates who
aren't far from their degrees. I also created the template to allow for printing on standard letter
sheets from a campus printer or for them to be eventually uploaded to a print-on-demand service
for later collection or for a future revenue stream.

I created graphics for the Peabody Professional Institutes' Summer 2005
offerings using an image of the most distinctive building on campus
with a bright purple—both commonly used in Peabody print pieces—to
provide a cohesive and visually interesting identity.

I compiled the abstracts for the AEFA 2005 annual meeting to accompany
the official program, hence no cover page. I tried to focus attention
on the content of each presentation by placing descriptions and titles
in main, left column.

This proposal cover posed a challenge to convey a focus on excellent
teaching while incorporating the logos of participating research institutions
and school districts. I tried to achieve this by using type and an
off-center photo to draw attention to the teacher while using the
negative space to group the institutions' logos.

This is the application icon submitted for the GD
Graphics Library icon competition. It was designed to represent
GD library's flexible, server-side creation of graphics where elements
could be "pealed back" on the fly.

This was a submission into the Trailblazer
icon competition. It was meant to represent the programs intent of
leading users back to a website that they'd found on a previous search
without bookmarking and could no longer find.

About

I'm Tim McElwee. I'm originally from Allegan
in Western Michigan. I've been a developer/designer since 2000.

In August of 2015, I transferred within ADP to AdvancedMD in South Jordan, Utah. I've been working to help revamp the look
and feel of AdvancedMDs practice management and electronic health records applications. I've been building proofs of concept
in AngularJS to ascertain viability of UX ideas. I've also been acting as a central resource for managing common SCSS/CSS
libraries used across the organization.

At the end of 2013 until the middle of 2015, I moved over to ADP's freshly opened
Innovation Lab. We're trying to make your HR systems experience suck less. I'm on the Creative Technology team that
works within the organization to explore new technologies and prototype new ideas ahead of production implementations.

I spent 2013 working for Whosay, a celebrity social networking service. I learned
all about modern Javascript-driven development, visited beautiful Albany on a regular basis, and got to meet some famous folks.

From 2011–2012, I moved back to New York for a second tour with SelectMinds, as the
Senior UX Developer, adding new features to the CommunityConnect social networking product, like mobile optimized pages, and
refining existing features to take advantage of user friendly techniques like AJAX loading and message sending.

From 2009–2011, I worked at Comcast Interactive Media in Philadelphia. I worked on Comcast.net, Xfinity.com, and
XfinityTV.com. That includes general front-end duties and getting to work with our search instances and our mobile
sites.

From 2005–2009, I worked in New York City as an interface engineer for Wunderman
and as a web developer at SelectMinds. Both were a great introduction to
different aspects of major league web design. At Wunderman, I learned how to crank work out in an advertising shop.
At SelectMinds, I got to focus on our software-as-service social networking product servicing Fortune 500 clients.

Before New York, I worked at the Peabody Center for Education Policy. It's an educational research center at
Peabody College of Vanderbilt Univesity,
in Nashville, Tennessee. While there, I had the luck to work with both the college and university to create their first CSS-driven websites.

All of this web focus started while I was an undergrad at GVSU.
I worked with learning and physically impaired students as a book reader/scanner and as the assistive technology trainer,
teaching students about the assistive software packages available through the disabilities services office. I really
enjoyed being able to show people how to use a piece of software that could make their daily life easier. Those experience
led to accessibility research when the division needed a new website. I discovered the web standards community through that
research and I've been on this journey ever since.